The Key to the Universe by Den Watson

The Key to the Universe by

Den Watson

Wallet, keys, phone. The modern man’s mantra. The wallet’s in its usual place on the counter—usually. The phone could be anywhere, and has been ‘misplaced’ so often there are now two phones, each with the Find Me app. I use it several times a year.

Have I mentioned it’s hell growing old? No, make that purgatory, because there’s still hope, and I know I’m going to keep losing the phone.

Now an essential part of this hope is my key-ring holder, a solid metal object shaped like six giraffes in flight, with six key hooks. I fastened the herd (it’s pretty cool) to the back of a double door that stays closed most of the time, and it’s been there for 40 years, hosting a parade of keys. Keys to cars and kids’ cars, to padlocks and doors long-forgotten, and always a key or two at the other end of the holder, finally discarded two days before you found the lock it fit.

Not so the car key, which is almost always on the left-hand hook, and is expensive and complicated to replace. I know this because I lost the duplicate key days after I bought the car, and it’s somewhere in Big Sur, I think. The key, that is. But although still misplaced—not as often as the phone!—I count my key hook a minor success, and the car key is up there right now. Although to be honest, I’m not sure where the car is...

The major turning point is way more complicated to explain, and takes place in 2010, the year a fascinating cult movie came out—What the Bleep Do We Know? —
“A genuinely upbeat movie with big questions and hopeful answers.”

A longer blurb invites us to “embark on a life-changing journey with Amanda (Marley Matlin), a divorced photographer who tumbles down a metaphysical rabbit hole. Her mind-bending voyage through the worlds of science and spirituality includes revelations by quantum physics experts, playful animation, and even a conversation with a wise 35,000-old Being. Ultimately, Amanda’s perception of reality is turned inside out, and the meaning of life becomes clear. See for yourself why this groundbreaking movie became one of the most compelling and talked about films of the year.”

The documentary was indeed provocative, challenging many of our most bedrock assumptions: the very way we look at the universe was coming under fire. Being in two places at the same time used to be No Way—now it’s Maybe. My ‘expert knowledge’ of quantum physics is reduced to this: Everything Changes, and Anything’s Possible.

And now I need to quote a favorite journalist, Lynne McTaggart, author of The Field and these words: The quest for the secret force of the universe.

“This book got started eight years ago, when in the course of my work I kept bumping up against miracles. Not miracles in the ordinary sense of the term, where the seas part or loaves of bread exponentially multiply, but miracles nonetheless, in their utter violation of the way we think the world works. The miracles that I came across had to do with hard scientific evidence concerning methods of healing that flout every notion we have about our own biology.”

Needless to say, this caught my interest. So did this quote:

“These discoveries left me with wonder but also profoundly unsettled. All these practices were based on an entirely different paradigm of the human body from that of modern science. These were medical systems which purported to work on ‘energetic levels,’ but I kept wondering precisely which energy it might be that they were talking about.”

And, finally, to conclude this term-paper approach, I offer an example of what it’s all about by relating a case described in one of the many books I’ve read—and docs I’ve seen—since, about alternate ways of thinking. My details may be fuzzy, but the situation is true, and has been scientifically validated by a double-blind gold standard study. Here it is.

About 40 or so AIDS patients were living in a clinic in Oakland, California. The cases were of varying degrees, some near death. It was in the early 80s and it was close enough to the initial outbreak to still be mystifying and fearful. There were no known cures.

On the other side of the continent in New England, an unusual group assembled: they were energy healers, people known to have effected healing and cures without surgery or pharmaceuticals, but with meditation and certain kinds of massaging and exercising of the body. The healers included doctors of various kinds, including what we might call today a witch doctor or a shaman, and they were all given photos of the patients, along with their names and ages. These healers then met several times and focused their energies on the stricken individuals 3000 miles away.

The results were immediate and dramatic. Improvements in all but a very few. Many left the clinic and returned to their lives in the outside world.

I have no idea how this happened. Do you?

PS I think a hint may be seen in the subtitle of Lynn McTaggart’s book The Field. If so, there’s a secret force in the universe, and I want to know more about it. Also, I’m familiar only with the introductions and prologue in The Field. Most of the supporting science is way over my head, and even the introductions are pretty close.

PPS ...okay, that was a joke. I knew where the car was. Just a little relief in purgatory:-)

DW 10/5/25